Cliffski Shows Us The Games

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Cliff “Positech” Harris, the man who is currently finishing off the campaign parts of Gratuitous Space Battles, has been busy with a side project: wrangling independent developers.They now have a new indie portal called Show Me The Games. It’s supposed to be a collection of some of the best indie games on the PC, and includes some that you might recognise. Cliff explains:

SMTG is a crazy plan to try and prove that indie game developers, despite theoretically being in competition, can come together as a group, throw some money in an ‘advertising’ bucket, and help promote each others games. It’s true that getting indie developers to organise together is like herding cats, but I’ve owned 4 cats over my life, so I’m not scared. Using the amazing nasa-like technology of random numbers, the SMTG site randomises the games listing so nobody gets ‘top slot’. This simple listing of games is hopefully just the start, there may well be competitions, discount bundles or all kinds of stuff happening on SMTG in the future. The main point is that we now have a fixed location to host that kind of thing.

I thought the actual title was: AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! A Reckless Disregard for gravity.

To be honest I don’t think it matters how you spell it as long as you say it out loud with the full force and emotion you would apply to saying it had you just jumped off the top of a mile high hallucinatory skyscraper

Am I the only one who didn’t like AI War? I used to play it quite a lot with a friend (we each have 22 hours of gameplay) and we just quit the game in a sudden after we realized the game is just a tedious tower defense with a few tricks that work each time.

Maybe you need to set the difficulty higher. I spent 30 gruesome hours on various campaigns before I realized that difficulty 7 is too low for me to enjoy the game. It only shines when you challenge yourself and play at your limit. It takes a while to find out where that sweet spot is., though

The important question is, when did you play it?
This game is constantly evolving, and if some tactic works too well, the devs quickly come up with some nasty update which balances it out and probably makes you regret using it the next time. ;)
It is worth contacting them on the official forums, they usually respond almost immediately.

That’s what The Pirate Bay is good for. If you don’t like it, you delete it anyway. if you like it, give the developer a amount of money that feels fair to you both. That’s it.
The rest is an illusion anyway.

It’s commercial games only, purely because we have pimped the site using real actual coinage, so everyone had to throw money in, and freeware games tend not to be able to do that.
Indie game databases do indeed already exist, but they have very little promotion behind them, because they tend not to advertise, due to the lack of a marketing budget.

Yeah, agreed. Although right now I’d recommend waiting for the Steam Christmas sale. It’s only just recently been sold for next to nothing so it seems like a bad time to buy it. Unless you’re 100% behind the idea of throwing money at indies for their indieness that is.

It’s basically one of SillySoft’s many risk-like variations. The best known is Lux. I am unsure as to what it offers in gameplay options that Lux doesn’t. The other variations offered specific maps and music and perhaps a campaign-like feature (not sure). In any case Lux itself has a lot of custom-made maps you can download (as well as a limited map generator).

Castle Vox has completely absorbed me. I am a hug fan of the simultaneous turn-based structure of Diplomacy and the “game-y” additions of multiple units and territory bonus makes Vox unique and strategically varied.

This ‘Gunrox’ doesn’t look too promising… Right on the front page you’ve got an almost exact replica of Fallout’s power armor, and ‘Zombie Outbreak”s thumbnail is a boomer from L4D. Oh, and ‘Quest For The Holy Grenade”s thumbnail is what looks like Cthulhu wearing power armor.

It should get some more love, they’ve got a big expansion in beta now (which you can currently get for free with a purchase of the standard game while it’s in beta). I highly recommend it, and the demo is at least worth a look.

Good on Cliffski, I hope this portal thing succeeds. I Shall check it out tomorrow, if I can tear myself away from the just-one-more-battlelry of the GSB campaign mode. I just got my huge fighter fleet absolutely slaughtered by a very nicely designed anti-fighter fleet – except “just” is more like 2 hours ago. And another game eats my life.

I own each game on the site save Gunrox, Mad Skills Motocross, Blackwell Convergence and New Star Soccer 2010. Not caring a whit for anything sports-related (aside from the fabulous–but abandoned–UT2K4 mod Deathball), does anyone have any experience with the other three?